Never Again!
On this particular date in the calendar, one naturally thinks back to tragic past events, for it was on this very day, but a few years ago, that Brian DePalma was born. A date which will live in infamy!
There’s a DePalma blogathon raging, and I *must* contribute! Not sure which film to watch though. I’ve gone from basically disliking all of them, to unclenching a bit and basically liking all of them. But I’ve never forced myself to sit through THE BLACK DAHLIA…
NB: think I’m swinging towards PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE.
shadowplay 
September 11, 2009 at 4:53 pm
wonderful!
Phantom of the Paradise is one of the few that I haven’t seen–have to rectify that..
I definitely like all of them (some more than others, of course… I’ve seen Black Dahlia a couple of times, and I’m still on the fence about it… it’s got problems, no doubt about that…)
September 11, 2009 at 4:58 pm
De Palma is…problematic. Definitely some skill there as a film-maker (“Untouchables” is pretty darn good and “Carrie” has its jolts) but his “aesthetic” is questionable, his tastes often demonstrably execrable. I know Pauline Kael was a big fan of his work, which goes to prove even smart people can (occasionally) make dumb choices.
Thanks for this…
September 11, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Some of those problems no doubt stem from the book, which gets by on ferocity but falls apart at the end. Ellroy’s solution to the true-life case is preposterous, but might pass muster in a giallo. In which case, DePalms is good casting.
It’s going to be PotP — probably not for a few days though.
September 11, 2009 at 5:02 pm
As for DePalma’s tastes, to get along with his work at all you kind of have to embrace an aesthetic that veers from trash to voluptuous aestheticism and back, wants to be Romantic with a capital R, and still find room for porn, cheap jokes, manic homaging, operatic emoting, and narrative insanity.
I’ve probably reconciled myself to all that to the point where The Untouchables starts to look a little tame.
September 11, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Herbert Lom is 92 today.
September 11, 2009 at 5:04 pm
September 11, 2009 at 5:06 pm
I know it’s not regarded as classic De Palma, but it’s surely impossible to watch CARLITO’S WAY and not find that last half hour insanely exciting.
September 11, 2009 at 5:13 pm
God bless, Herbert Lom. Is he still reasonably healthy, does anyone know?
September 11, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Somehow his most egregiously trashy films (Body Double, Femme Fatale) are the ones I enjoy most. Raising Cain, I like a lot because of the WHAT THE FUCK!!ity of it all (and the audacity of crossing Peeping Tom with Vertigo). I used to take deP a lot more seriously than I do now, and the films that look like he was taking himself seriously have aged a lot worse than the ‘exercises’.
I have still never, ever managed to sit all the way through that soft-focus bollocks, Obsession, though. Possibly because Mad magazine lampooned it in my youth as Sob Session.
September 11, 2009 at 5:15 pm
A friend of mine had dinner with Herbert Lom and Burt Kwouk a couple of years ago. Both were in fine fettle then, though Lom spent the entire dinner trying to get that script doctor guy from Adaptation (yes, what a starry list of diners!) to do a rewrite on the then impending Pink Panther remake. I wonder if it helped.
September 11, 2009 at 5:47 pm
The best ones for delirious craziness might be Femme Fatale and Raising Cain (and maybe Sisters – I can’t remember it too well). I recently watched Snake Eyes and The Fury, and while they had their share of delirious craziness, too much outright crappiness snuck into their second halves. Black Dahlia has two or three amazing scenes but was kind of a drag overall. Of course you will never go wrong with Phantom of the Paradise.
September 11, 2009 at 5:48 pm
I forgot Sisters! I do love that film.
September 11, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Apart from supporting Tony Blair, Lom still seems to be physically and mentally sound as a pound. That’s probably his cue to keel over with a coronary. Don’t do it, Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru! The world still needs Chief Inspector Dreyfuss.
Sisters is rather fine. DePalma joins that select group of filmmakers not ashamed to exploit real “freaks.” Which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Bernard Herrmann classes it up. Thanks to BH and Cliff Robertson and Genevieve Bujold I rather like Obsession, which is more twisted than it initially seems (adding an incestuous wrinkle to Vertigo’s straight necromance).
I can’t get on with The Fury, which does indeed cross too many lines into embarrassing territory. Mark Cousins showed a clip to Kirk Douglas, who physically cringed, as best he was able.
Raising Cain is foul and beautiful. That bit with the fright-wigged child hallucination, out of the blue: “It is a bad thing that you are doing!”
September 11, 2009 at 6:19 pm
I think the worst problem with DAHLIA is that De Palma (who is the diametric reverse of a misogynist, in my opinion) simply does not believe that I woman can be evil… which makes a lame duck of Hilary Swank’s awful femme fatale (and doubly so after the amazing Femme Fatale itself–which makes that hoary–whory?–trope into the empowering figure that feminist critics would like to believe they see in many of the noirs of the forties)
anyway, this essentialist conceit (like ALL essentialisms) is deeply problematic at the philosophical level, but it has lent amazing strength to his one-man war against the patriarchal thriller
Dahlia is worth seeing for the “audition reel” stuff alone (with De Palma’s voice in a key role)… haven’t read the novel, but I suspect that most of what I don’t like about the film is unfiltered Ellroy
September 11, 2009 at 6:20 pm
uhhh—“does not believe that A woman can be evil” … “not I woman” (hear me retract my roar)
September 11, 2009 at 6:22 pm
—————
Herbert Lom is 92 today.
—————
My God. How time flies. Good on you, Herbert. Happy Birthday.
I like de Palma’s Carlito’s Way.
September 11, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Not a De Palma fan, but Carrie I never get tired of – a fact that I contribute more to Spacek than De Palma, and the wacky score during the gym class detention. Also, Sisters has its moments, which mostly lie in the psychedelic flashback and split-screen.
September 11, 2009 at 6:28 pm
I think I found DePalma rather funny much of the time,. For example in Hi Mom!, when Jennifer Salt finished recounting her betrayal in the back of car, I couldn’t help but laugh, it’s just that ridiculous. It seemed to me DePalma likes careening between high romantic and the gutter, and something in him can’t help doing it in his more personal films. It makes them more interesting in a narrative sense than the films really would be otherwise. Even in a silly film like Home Movies, he can’t help parodying his own romantic impulses (along with needling John Milius and the rest of the men’s movement as a bunch of closet cases). His career is a lot more interesting than some of his contemporaries (need I mention names?), but he still has to answer for Wise Guys, which was stupid enough to make me wish I never rented it.
September 11, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Carlito’s Way has a few taste missteps, but it’s got my favourite BDP long take, the escape at the end. Certainly prefer it to Shitface.
Just watched Phantom of the Paradise, whose credits boast Sissy Spacek as set dresser.
September 11, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Oh I LOVE The Fury. And DePalma ALWAYS “crosses over into embarassing territory.” That’s part of his charm.
He’s also quite the cineaste. Jonathan Rosenbaum says he always runs into him at film festivals. DePalma goes to them not for his own work (save when soemthing is showing) but to keep up with the state of world cinema — in which he’s quite well-versed.
September 11, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Phantom of the Paradise brings an awful lot to the party and would certainly be my first choice. Raising Cain I remember being a hoot, and Snake Eyes I also seem to remember being almost as happy a poop-back-and-forth marriage of director and star (actually all I remember is Nicolas Cage’s “You’re a number cruncher! Crunch numbers!”)
September 11, 2009 at 6:44 pm
We saw DePalma here at the Film Festival a few years back, and Fiona virtually hung out with him. He boasts of being the ONLY director who goes to film festivals to see films. Despite his sometimes curmudgeonly air, the festival organizers loved him because he was so easy to handle: just give the man movie tickets and he’s happy.
Phantom, to my surprise, is like a poptastic summary of DePalma themes and tropes, some of them shoehorned in with a certain desperation as if he never expected to work again. Not in any way approaching perfection, indeed probably shuffling raggedly away from said goal, but very interesting indeed. More later.
September 11, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Happy Birthday, Herbert Lom, and good point, David C. about his one flaw. But 90s something John Mills also had the same failing. The Labour Party of 1945 is as extinct as the New Deal Democratic Party of FDR but many still fondly remember this past history.
Anyway, I like SISTERS, OBSESSION, and PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE and the ending of THE FURY is deliciously excessive. However, I note am ominous silence over DRESSED TO KILL.
September 11, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Phantom is being remade. Who is the Paul Williams of our time? Could such a thing exist?
September 11, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Phantom of the Paradise does have an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink feel to it. You can click off the homages and parodies one after another, ;ole a pileup.
Winslow! Breakfast!
September 11, 2009 at 10:09 pm
I think maybe the Paul Williams of our time is Lady Gaga.
Dressed to Kill… I would need to revisit it to form any definite views. I remember finding it dislikable in the extreme, which is something I might have to admit about a lot of DePalma.
We haven’t discussed Casualties of War yet either — and I still haven’t seen Redacted.
September 11, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Off-topi, BUT
This trailer for Tom Ford’s film of Isherwood’s A Single Man looks quite good.
September 11, 2009 at 11:06 pm
I actually liked Casualties of War since it gave Fox a dramatic role, Penn’s tough-guy mug throughout was a little much since I just watched Fast Times before it aired (some tv station thought it would be a good idea to group the two).
September 11, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Ah, “Carlito’s Way”–I forgot that one. Not a bad film at all, with Sean Penn and Pacino making a great acting tandem.
And that tracking shot in “Scarface”, from the bathroom and the buzzing, biting chainsaw, out the window and back again.
I think David Cronenberg did a kind of homage to that shot at the beginning of “History of Violence”, when the one killer re-enters the motel. Anyone remember the scene I’m talking about? A part of you (as in “Scarface”) is going, “Man, don’t take me in there…”
September 11, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Nice trailer! Matthew Goode is pretty interesting.
I’m sure I’d have liked Casualties better if it had been made by Jack Clayton as originally planned. But BDP did a great job, apart from the end where Morricone gets too operatic, trampling all over the film.
DePalma had a computer program that drew storyboards for him, with little stick figures with facial expressions. Michael J Fox regarded them with horror — “Don’t show me a drawing of how I’m supposed to act!”
September 12, 2009 at 3:03 am
The end of CASUALTIES was appalling ,apart from the Morricone score. To have the non-Ugly American forgiven by the resurrected dead Vietnamese girl was totally obnoxious and another way of getting America off the hook ideology. It was Michael J. Fox’s tragedy not the raped and murdered Vietnamese girl. I’m sure the source material was much better and that Jack Clayton would have made a much better film.
September 12, 2009 at 7:24 am
What, talk of “Phantom of the Paradise” and no mention of Jessica Harper? I’m ashamed of y’all! (Haven’t seen the film in years, but I have very good memories of Harper in it.)
And then there’s Angie Dickinson, shortly before her assignation in “Dressed to Kill,” making the note in her notebook to “pick up turkey” …
September 12, 2009 at 10:37 am
Jessics Herper’s lovely and spooky. There. And Prince for Paul Williams 2010, hel yeh.
September 12, 2009 at 10:39 am
Having said that, Jacko’s death pretty much renders a Phantom remake obsolete. The prophetic nature of Paul William’s Peter Pan is, for me, one of the chief kicks of the film.
September 12, 2009 at 11:08 am
Williams’ character is a bit of a Phil Spektor too. Can we say “contemporary resonance”?
I’m writing more about the lovely Jessica in my post proper, which will go up, oh, probably Monday. I wound up being more critical than I thought I would, but it comes from a warm place, you know?
Tony, you’ve nailed the problem with the Casualties ending. It feels like a DePalma add-on, a cinematic gesture which actually cancels out the good intentions elsewhere in the movie. The idea of Brian “violence is extremely beautiful” DePalma making a film about war and rape filled me with dread, but he was actually doing OK up until that point. Not a film about war, but a pertinent film about peer pressure.
September 12, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Jessica Harper is definitely an auteur : see also Suspiria, Inserts, Pennies From Heaven.
September 12, 2009 at 3:23 pm
I’m with David E here, THE FURY is underrated. I remember reading a conversation between Kael (I think) and Godard in which the latter also lent his praise (I’ll see if I can find it).
September 12, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Edit: What am I talking about: Godard used a chunk of THE FURY in HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA: his poetic masterpiece of the cinema.
September 12, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Yes, David E. we must not forget the important role of players in films. After watching Cathy 0’Donell in the superbly photographed THE AMAZING DR. X by John Alton (of which the DVD restoration still only depicts the films as a shadow of its former self), it is important to recognize those talents whose careers were either ruined (OD) or did not take off in the direction they should (H). However, we have these films to appreciate their work.
September 12, 2009 at 4:02 pm
O’Donnell’s fun in Mr X, and really good in the companion film, Bury Me Dead (not as good a movie, but interesting).
I had to read the credits of Minority Report in order to realize that was Harper in the flashbacks. She’s changed a lot, but she’s still really striking.
September 12, 2009 at 6:12 pm
The real standout in Minority Report is the great Lois Smith. Spielberg gives her a virtual aria.
September 12, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Oh yeah, she’s terrific. I’d like that film a lot if it finished about forty minutes earlier, in the hotel room, having fulfilled its stated intent to be a sci-fi noir. But Spielberg bottles out.
September 12, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Redacted is, sadly, unwatchable in a very Diary of the Dead way, ie its heart is in the right place but the execution is embarrassingly clunky. There really needs to be a moratorium on ‘YouTube generation’ movies by ’60s veterans.
September 12, 2009 at 7:11 pm
It was an interesting idea, and a very DePalmaesque one, but I suspect any kind of mockumentary approach is going to fail when the filmmakers have an irrepressible enthusiasm for certain kinds of exuberant performance styles…
I actually enjoyed Diary of the Dead, but only after I’d made up my mind that the camcorder device was a failure and best ignored. Watched purely as a zombie movie I thought it was… OK.
September 12, 2009 at 7:49 pm
OK is about right. I liked the swimming-pool zombies but then, there was no reason for them to be in the swimming-pool, it seemed. The less said about the framing idea, the better. Romero has been getting great responses to his new one, which features two feuding Irish zombie-farming families! I just absolutely can’t wait.
September 13, 2009 at 8:47 pm
I shoul state my bias here in that I love all of DePalma’s films that I’ve had the chance to see (with the exception of Mission To Mars, but I’ll quickly pass over that one!) I think my absolute favourite at the moment would have to be Body Double for its take on voyeurism, performance and obsession. But any number of his films could rotate into the top position for me. After reading the comments, I have a couple of comments to make too!:
Jessica Harper also turns up as a commune member in [Safe], which is a film well worth tracking down.
I don’t find that ending of Casualties of War as controversial as others did, perhaps because I felt that it was only a superficial absolution that would never supercede the trauma of what Fox had witnessed. I think the end of that film was intended to show that the nation had moved past Vietnam and while the scars would remain for the individuals the horror was ‘finished’ for the nation (in that sense making it a telling comment on the whole wave of films that finally tackled the subject and provided various ‘final statements’ on the situation. The Casualties ending is sort of a nose thumb to an audience looking for an inbuilt moral lesson to take away with them).
There is an interesting comparison to be made to Redacted beyond the obvious one of the rape of a country embodied in a literal assualt – it is most telling in what it doesn’t carry over from the previous film. There’s a Michael J. Fox substitute in the character of McCoy but he is not the only person to be disgusted by the acts of his colleagues so he does not seem like one person against the system. And instead of a ‘you must have had a bad dream but you are awake now’ absolving by a Iraqi substitute as Fox had at the end of Casualties of War from the asian girl on the train it is telling that McCoy does not get the same kind of absolution in Redacted because this is not a retrospective film – this is not in the past and the killing is not over. However he does get a US welcome from insulated, uncomprehending friends and family who, after he recounts his trauma, can only give him a round of applause and a kiss as if to say “forget about it, you are home now”, which is all he could hope for at this time (and itself a comment on short termism and willingly blinding yourself to the realities of a situation to not rock the boat).
September 13, 2009 at 11:02 pm
September 13, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Fiona says “What woman could resist the Argyle sweater, specs and mullet combo?”
Colin, what you say may be why I blame Morricone’s score for some of Casualties of War’s problems — while the visuals may have the kind of ambiguity you suggest, the score definitely declares “This Is An American Tragedy But It’s All Better Now.”
September 14, 2009 at 12:25 am
Morrricone + Pet Shop Boys!
September 14, 2009 at 12:34 am
September 14, 2009 at 12:36 am
Femme Fatale — DePalma’s response to Kieslowski — is nutty but surprisingly likable, which is not a word I associate with him.
September 14, 2009 at 2:33 pm
All DePalma’s films have bombastic, beautifully ironic in their straight faced emotionalism, musical scores – that’s what heightens them into classics. :)